Richard Jury Mysteries 10: The Old Silent (34 page)

"No, probably not."

"It won't keep you from seeing me off, then?"

"Never. Nothing would keep me from seeing you off. I simply wish you
weren't
going
off." He might have opened with a lie, but this
was certainly the truth. He was standing with the receiver in his hand,
looking up again at the patch of dirty winter sky.
And sometimes I
think of high windows/ The sun's
— Yesterday's sun.

"What? What did you say?"

He must have spoken aloud without realizing it. "I was just thinking
of a message I wrote a long time ago."

"What was it?"

"To a girl who loved to dance to an old Jerome Kern song called
'Yesterdays.' " Jury asked, "Was it always better? Yes-terday, I mean.
There've been so many songs written about it."

Vivian was silent for a moment. "Perhaps it was. Or perhaps it will
be," she added sadly. "I'm sorry about the girl."

"I was only six." He tried to bring some lightness to this little
confession.

"Then that's sadder." She paused. "The train leaves at eleven in the
morning. The morning after tomorrow." Her tone was tentative, as if she
didn't really believe he'd be there. "Victoria. I think."

Jury smiled. "The Orient Express always leaves from Victoria."

"Oh. Marshall and I are coming up to London. . . . Where's Melrose?
I can't find Melrose."

Her voice was distant, as if she'd been talking away from the
telephone, looking about the room, hoping to find Melrose. Hell, had
Melrose Plant forgotten, too?

"Where
is
everybody?" She wept into the silence.

Quickly, Jury said, "Vivian, he's in Haworth. He stopped off there
on his way back from Harrogate."

"For what?"

"He was tired, I expect. If you'd just driven Agatha over a hundred
miles, wouldn't you be?" At least, she laughed at that. "I think his
idea was just to stay the week until he had to collect her, rather than
drive all the way back again." Before she could reflect on the location
of the Old Silent, he went on lying. "Look, I'll ring him up and tell
him to call you immediately. I think he said they were having trouble
with the telephone service—"

"That's very good."

" 'Good*?" He heard the smile in her voice.

"That tale. Just as long as you're both there, Richard. Tell him
he's forgiven."

"Forgiven—?" But she'd already hung up.

Eight years, and now she was going off to marry some smirking
Italian, and it was the first time he'd heard her call him Richard.

"A friend gave them to me," said Jury. "Get-well gift." He cradled
the massive bunch of flowers Wiggins had brought back and looked
deadpan across Chief Superintendent Racer's desk.

Sergeant Wiggins was perched on the edge of the leather sofa; Fiona
(who'd been called in to search for Cyril) was busy pinning a white
rose from the bouquet into her plunging neckline, thereby enhancing
the cleavage even more. "Still look pale to me, you do."

Wiggins agreed: "Bedrest, I told him, and proper medication—"

"Oh,
stop
it," shouted Racer. "He's about as sick as that
pint-sized panther that's lurking in here." He raised his head
slightly, as if he were sniffing the air. Then his head popped below
the surface of his desk, his voice coming back to them hollow and
brandy-soaked. "Where is he?" His head came up again. "Stop fooling
with that damned rose
and find
him, Miss Clingmore. As for
you
—"
Racer pointed his finger, thumb turned in gun-wise, at Jury's chest. "
You
are finished. That's the ugliest bunch of flowers I've ever seen. Who
sent it? Keighley police?"

The flowers were, indeed, a strangely unintegrated mess of tiger
lilies, white roses, rubbery green leaves, and brown thistlelike
things. Jury had no idea what they were. He said nothing, hoping that a
Racer-monologue could be hurried along if he didn't respond unless it
were absolutely necessary.

"Another call from Sanderson just this afternoon.
Again
he
told me you'd been mucking about—"

In someone else's manor
, thought Jury wearily.

"—in their manor." Racer's head swiveled left to right and back
again as he yelled to Fiona that the ball of mange was in here. Fiona
was pretentiously looking behind pillows, peering under the couch.
Wiggins removed a packet of Fisherman's Friends with stealth. "You
hear it? The bells?" Racer's tone was frantic.

Jury pulled at his earlobe, wondering when Racer would at last
slither into a Poe-esque black tarn. "The bells" referred to the four
aluminum ones sewn to Cyril's new collar, a collar that the chief
superintendent demanded he wear. Fiona had insisted the collar have
elastic in it in case Cyril got caught in a tree limb and hanged
himself.
Do you see any trees in this office. Miss Clingmore?
Wait, that's an idea. Have one planted somewhere and let the beast claw
his way up it. I'll see to it he never gets down
.

What Racer was hearing was not bell-music, but tinkling bottles.
Agile as Cyril was, there was no way to work his way through the glass
forest of the drinks cabinet without its producing some sound. The
collar, of course, had been worked off in a trice every morning after
Racer had had a chance to see it was on.

"Just sign this, Jury. In triplicate." He tapped some of the Yard's
business stationery with his Mont Blanc pen.

"Sign what?" Jury asked with innocently raised eyebrows. What was
his chief up to now? The paper was blank.

"Your resignation." Racer showed rather yellowed, dog-like teeth
when he smiled his sly smile. "It can be filled in later."

Jury checked his watch beneath the flower-cover. Smart's offices
closed at five, probably, and he wanted to pay a visit to the Starrdust
before he went to the Ritz . . . after four now . . . He measured out
times. Twenty minutes at least to get to Elizabeth Street (rush hour,
too), leaving at best five minutes for one of Racer's Byzantine
lectures on the reputation of the Yard and Jury's part in the ruining
of it. The commissioner, of course, knew the opposite was true. No, no
time.

"All right." He pulled the blank sheets over, signed the three pages
swiftly with a flourish he hoped befitted Mont Blanc. "Now may I go?
The flowers are wilting." He had, at the same time, seen Fiona backing
up to the drinks cabinet where he knew the high heel of her shoe could
catch in the latch. Consequently, he kept Racer open-mouthed and
blindfolded (so to speak) until he heard a click.

Wiggins was in place at the door to Fiona's outer office and Racer
quickly looked round Jury in order to salve his pride by finding some
reason to yell at the sergeant. "And just where do you think
you're
going, dammit?"

Jury looked just in time to see copper fur streaking out the door.
Given the speed, he assumed Cyril wouldn't have to go to a
detoxification center.

"To the toilet. Sir."

The two scooted out and Jury followed with his flowers, turning at
the door to give his boss a salute. "I'm always available if you need
any help writing that." He bestowed a blissful smile on Racer and
closed the door.

There was a thud, a splintering sound, and another paperweight hit
the floor inside.

Flowers offered
carte blanche
. They could get you past
nearly everyone but Racer, thought Jury, as the receptionist at Smart
Publishing House sat with her hand vaguely reaching for the
interoffice telephone, dazzled both by Jury and by Jury's huge bouquet
of tiger lilies and roses.

Jury just barely stopped at her desk to draw a white rose and put it
on her blotter. He now had his foot on the stair. "I'll just go up,
shall I?" This short-circuited the dainty hand and it drew back from
the receiver where it cupped itself on her chin. She knew true love
when she saw it.

Mavis Crewes didn't. When Jury walked into her rain forest-jungle of
an office with the flowers behind his back, she leapt from her chair.
"How
dare
you—" and her hand reached for her own telephone
either to chew out the receptionist or call New Scotland Yard.

Until she saw the massive bouquet that he produced together with an
apology she could have taken for anything or everything he'd said,
since he didn't want to specify what it was. "I've also read ten issues
of
Travelure
." He offered her a smile as blinding as one of
Charlie Raine's riffs.

Stopped her in her tracks, that did. "If you find me a vase, I'll
fill it."

"I, uh. Yes. There's one right here." She reached round an ivory
bookcase and pulled out a tall crystal one etched with a jaguar in a
tree. She motioned to a door. "Powder room," she said cutely.

Such convenience in the jungle as one's private toilet. For the
office, like her home, was done in dark olive-green, a muddy brown,
ivory, and flashes of orange. It was painted in a confusing collision
of these colors, ornamented with plants and jungle fakery, like the
stuffed rabbit-monkey climbing a skinny tree. One wall was a
trompe-l'oeil painting of what some artist conceived as a jungle
interior. A huge cat was coming right at him.

Another cat, her cat, apparently, merely spat at him. That was all
it could raise its lazy head to do. It sat curled in the prime seat—a
dark green velvet sofa, displaying itself before brown and ivory
cushions laced with orange. Long-haired, probably Himalayan, or some
other exotic breed.

He was running water in the vase in her powder room thinking of a
pub called the Blue Parrot outside of Long Piddleton where Trevor Sly,
the publican, had done his desert-safari look with far less money and
no experience. The old film posters of the journeys of Peter O'Toole
and Peggy Ashcroft, ill-fated, had struck him as sadly convincing. Then
he thought of Hannah Lean. . . .

"What's taking so long?" Mavis called in a singsongish, fluting
voice.

Jury looked at himself in the Art Nouveau mirror above the sink and
wondered who he was. Racer's offer in triplicate might not be a bad
idea. A long-overdue vacation. Another place, another country.
Somewhere stark, where the rations were slim and one had to live, like
Cyril, by canni-ness.

Unlike his cup, the vase was overflowing.

As Mavis Crewes, a cigarette in an ivory holder (this ivory was
real, he suspected), rabbited on about her travels, her safari
adventures, he sat at the other end of the cat's sofa and loathed her.
She was shallow, overly precious in her movements, self-absorbed. She
was as transparent as Mary

Lee's new shoes, made of smoke. And with her dress of the same
swirling colors as her office, she could have vanished before his eyes
and he'd never know it.

". . .
absolutely
four-star food. The chef was Hungarian.
Would you believe it?"

She had apparently been talking about one of her safari trips. "I
assumed people drank from tin bottles and ate army rations."

That made her whoop with delight, enough to make the insolent cat
blink once. "Good Lord, no. One has one's entire entourage."

Jury wondered why it was that the ones who were blessed with an
"entourage" were the ones who deserved them least. He thought of Nell
Healey in that medieval prison of her father's; he thought of Jenny
Kennington, years ago, in a huge and empty dining room where the only
color was the sunlight across the varnished floor. Women like this, the
ones he would remember, had no entourage; they stood in his mind like
statues in snow, yet with money to burn.

"Do you take your cat with you?" He looked at the obviously
indulged and spiteful cat. Cyril could stiff it with one flashing paw.

Jury winced when he heard her talk about Taffy, but smiled when he
thought about Cyril. Such people as Mavis Crewes had so indulged
themselves—even the starvation diet that kept her cruelly thin was an
indulgence of the ego —that they became insensate. Her plants, her cat,
herself thriving in the even temperature of their surroundings, would
never survive in the cold world beyond her solarium. Her thermostat did
her breathing for her.

". . . could stand a vacation yourself." Her wide mouth smiled
slyly, her eyelids drooped, her voice lowered, probably hoping to get
at Lauren Bacall's real jungle-cat image.

Jury returned the smile with one equally false. "Oh, I do. Are
safaris particularly relaxing?" He eased himself down into the sofa,
put his hands behind his neck, gave the impression he had all day, if
she liked. He forced himself to smile a particularly seductive smile,
to make it reach his eyes.

Mavis apparently "liked," all right. His look pulled her out of her
chair and around the desk as effectively as Charlie Raine's had drawn
Mary Lee from behind Jury's back.

Resting against the desk, both palms back on the polished surface as
if for support, she said, "Well, that depends. How much relaxation were
you looking for?"

"Total. Something that would take my mind off everything—this
rotten city" (he loved London), "my all-hours job" (he loved his job,
too, he supposed), "my solitary life" (he did not love that). "What are
the sleeping arrangements? Tents?"

"Very nice ones, very cozy, really."

"Any doubles?"

Mavis Crewes was enjoying this game immensely. It was what she was
good at, games. Jury hated them.

"But of course."

He did not rise to light her cigarette; it would have lost him an
edge of advantage. Sleepily, he said, "I doubt I could stand up to the
competition. Tigers, jaguars, you know."

"You certainly don't sound like Roger. But you're probably not a
shooter. Literally, I mean."

"Oh, but I am. I've been through D-six training. I'm not a marksman,
but I got a first-class rating. How good was Roger?"